Wireless devices such as cell phones, wireless routers and radio operated devices are in widespread use today. Wireless devices enable the users to receive and transmit signals without the need for a physical connection between transmitters and receivers. This lack of physical connection increases the mobility of the wireless devices, and also decreases the overhead and inconveniences associated with use of wires, cables and other physical medium for establishing communication between two devices.
Despite the foregoing advantages, the use of wireless devices is not without shortcomings. One such shortcoming is that the transmission paths between wireless nodes in a system, such as a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system, can be unreliable. In wireless transmission paths, fading and shadowing amongst other factors can cause the wireless signal, and hence the corresponding data rate of the transmitted signal, to vary depending on certain events. One such event is the presence of animate and inanimate objects in the environment, which may cause the quality of the data transmission to vary over space and time. The variation and lack of reliability in data transmission may cause problems for multimedia streaming applications since sudden decreases in transmission path capacity may cause noticeable artifacts to occur during display or playback of the multimedia stream.
It is thus desirable to predict the changes in transmission path capacity so as to make it easier for the multimedia source to change its output data rate to match the expected change in transmission path capacity, since the multimedia source would have more time in which to make the output rate change.